From the Californian Ideology to the Texan Ideology

This is a primer on the shift from the Californian Ideology to the Texan Ideology.

Thirty years apart, two critiques gave a name to how the tech industry explains itself. In 1995 the answer was San Francisco, the network, and the promise of connection. In 2025 the answer moved to Texas, the megaproject, and the business of extraction. The terms are not synonyms, and the distance between them tracks a change in what the industry actually sells. Read together, they turn a shift in mood into a shift you can date, map, and follow.

Table of contents

• The short answer
• What do the two terms mean?
• Where the Californian Ideology comes from
• Where the Texan Ideology comes from
• What actually differs
• Three kinds of extraction
• The continuity beneath the rupture
• The looted imaginary
• Where the concept overreaches
• A practitioner’s view
• Related concepts and further reading

The short answer

The Californian Ideology, named by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron in 1995, is the legitimizing mythology of the networking era: a faith that digital connection would set everyone free.¹ The Texan Ideology, named by the historian Fred Turner in 2025, is the legitimizing mythology of the extraction era: a faith that entrepreneurs blessed with special gifts should be free to take the wealth of the planet.² Both are diagnoses by critics of how the industry narrates itself, and Turner published his on the thirtieth anniversary of the essay he was answering.³

The mythology changed because the business model changed. When the product was the network, the story naturalized connection. When the product became compute, land, and power, the story shifted to naturalize extraction. Turner argues the relationship is genealogical. Once the leading businesses depended on immense compute, electricity, land, and state cooperation, the airy metaphor of cyberspace lost its descriptive power, and a mythology of drilling and building fit the balance sheet better. The order is causal: the era of connecting everyone built the infrastructure that made extracting from everyone possible, and the mythology changed to fit the assets.

What do the two terms mean?

The Californian Ideology describes the belief system that grew up around Silicon Valley in the 1990s. Barbrook and Cameron defined it as a hybrid faith that fused the counterculture of San Francisco with the free-market enterprise of the computer industry, promising that new technologies would deliver personal liberation and prosperity at once.¹ The Texan Ideology names its successor. Turner defines it as a century-old fusion of resource extraction and millenarian Christianity, now inherited by a tech elite that has relocated its companies, its capital, and its self-image toward Texas.²

Naming an ideology is itself a critical act, in the tradition of Marx and Engels. It makes a pattern visible so that the people caught inside it can argue with its assumptions.¹ Barbrook and Cameron used the move to expose a contradiction that 1990s Silicon Valley experienced as plain common sense. Turner extends the same method to a tech elite that now narrates itself in the vocabulary of oil, land, and providence.

Where the Californian Ideology comes from

Barbrook and Cameron first published “The Californian Ideology” in the London magazine Mute on September 1, 1995, then in a revised, definitive version in Science as Culture the following year.¹ Their target was the emerging consensus of Wired-era Silicon Valley, which they read as a contradiction wearing the costume of common sense. The ideology, they wrote, “promiscuously combines the freewheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies,” welding the New Left’s dream of personal freedom to the New Right’s faith in unfettered markets.⁴ The state was the enemy of both halves. Government would be rendered obsolete by the network itself.

The purest expression of that anti-government reflex arrived a few months later. On February 8, 1996, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, John Perry Barlow published “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” addressed to the “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel.”⁵ Cyberspace, Barlow announced, was a new home of Mind where the tyrannies of the old world held no sovereignty. By the end of 1996 the text had spread to at least 40,000 websites, the Jeffersonian charter of the digital age.⁵ Barbrook and Cameron had already diagnosed the wish it expressed: a longing for a new Jeffersonian democracy in which individuals would roam free through cyberspace, and the material conditions of that freedom stayed carefully out of frame.¹

The deeper history was written by the same scholar who would later name the successor ideology. In From Counterculture to Cyberculture (2006), Turner traced how Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth network carried the computer from a Cold War symbol of military control to a countercultural tool of personal liberation, fusing two traditions that looked like opposites.⁶ Having authored the definitive genealogy of where the Californian Ideology came from, Turner was well placed to diagnose what replaced it.

Where the Texan Ideology comes from

Turner’s core claim is that the new mythology has deep roots in Texas soil. “The Texan Ideology grows out of two centuries of resource extraction in the heart of the Bible Belt.”² The layers are literal. Antebellum Texas built its economy on cotton and slavery, with cotton production rising from under 60,000 bales in 1850 to more than 400,000 by 1860.⁷ After the Civil War came the cattle drives, then, on January 10, 1901, the Lucas Gusher blew in at Spindletop and made modern Texas an oil state almost overnight, birthing Texaco, Gulf, and the company that became Exxon within a single year.⁷

The figure who carries this history is the wildcatter: the independent driller who bets everything on a hunch, strikes it rich, and credits his own nerve. H.L. Hunt, the oil wildcatter who became one of the wealthiest Americans of his era, spent the 1950s funding a right-wing media apparatus, the Facts Forum and Life Line broadcasts that fused anti-communism with fundamentalist Christianity.⁸ His descendant in this lineage is Tim Dunn, a Midland oil billionaire and preacher who has spent decades and tens of millions pulling the Texas Republican Party toward Christian nationalism and who reportedly told a Jewish former House Speaker that only Christians should hold leadership positions in the legislature.⁹

Onto this ground the tech industry moved. Elon Musk relocated himself to Texas in December 2020; Tesla shifted its headquarters from Palo Alto to Austin in 2021; SpaceX and X followed to Starbase and Bastrop in 2024, part of a documented wave that saw 132 California corporate headquarters relocate to Texas between 2018 and 2021.¹⁰ The ideology took built form. Tesla opened its Austin Gigafactory with a “Cyber Rodeo” in April 2022, a stadium spectacle on a 2,500-acre site that Musk billed as the largest building in the world, a superlative that independent tallies rank second after the Boeing Everett Factory.¹¹ In May 2025 the residents of Starbase, roughly 260 of them SpaceX employees, voted 212 to 6 to incorporate as a city, electing a SpaceX vice president as mayor: a literal company town where the firm controls zoning, permitting, and the road closures its rocket launches require.¹²

The migration brought institution-builders as well as factories. Joe Lonsdale, a Palantir cofounder, moved his venture firm 8VC to Austin in 2020, founded the Cicero Institute to draft market-friendly state policy, and helped launch the University of Austin, an “anti-woke” college that opened its first undergraduate class in 2024.¹³ The pattern is consistent. Each arrival builds out the surrounding apparatus, the schools, think tanks, and company towns that reproduce the worldview and lock it into local institutions.

What actually differs

Strip away the shared vocabulary of freedom, and a clean set of oppositions remains. The table sets them against each other; the prose after it draws out the axis that matters most.

The frontier changes substance. Barlow’s frontier had “no matter here”; it was a placeless commons of pure mind.⁵ The Texan frontier is aggressively material: acres of land, gigawatts of power, water rights, and a claim that runs from West Texas to Mars. The spiritual register shifts with it, from the diffuse holism of the Whole Earth network to a providential faith that God rewards the deserving entrepreneur with oil and money. At a Stanford talk previewing his essay, Turner put the creed plainly: an inherited belief “that America is a Christian nation,” that “entrepreneurs with special abilities” should run free, and “that when they do, God will reward them with the wealth of the planet.”¹⁴

The deepest difference sits in the last row. The Californian Ideology promised that the network would make government obsolete, an anti-politics of exit: leave the old world behind for the frictionless new one. The Texan Ideology drops the pretense of leaving. It moves toward the state to capture it, rewriting municipal boundaries into company towns and state tax codes into private subsidies. Barlow wanted the weary giants of flesh and steel to leave cyberspace alone; the Texan builder wants the machinery of the state close at hand, staffed by allies, tuned to his permits and his tax rate. The old dream of making government irrelevant has curdled into a project of making government yours: exit has turned into rule.

Three kinds of extraction

If “connection” was the Californian keyword, “extraction” is the Texan one, and it operates on three levels at once.

The first is social. The surveillance-capitalism business model that matured in California already treated human behavior as a resource to be mined: attention, data, and culture converted into a predictive asset. The Texan mythology inherits this and hardens it, dropping the language of connection that once softened it.¹⁵

The second is material, and it is where the metaphor becomes physical infrastructure. Texas has become the national epicenter of AI’s hunger for power. ERCOT, the state grid operator, revised its 2030 data center load forecast upward from about 30 gigawatts to roughly 78 gigawatts in a single year, and by early 2026 was fielding interconnection requests for hundreds of gigawatts of large loads, the overwhelming majority of them data centers.¹⁶ Bitcoin miners arrived first and wrote the playbook: Riot Platforms alone collected tens of millions of dollars a year from ERCOT for curtailing consumption during grid stress, earning revenue for powering down the same machines it otherwise runs to mine bitcoin.¹⁷

The flagship of this build-out is Stargate, the OpenAI, Oracle, and Crusoe Energy campus rising near Abilene in West Texas. Designed for roughly 1.2 gigawatts of power on 875 acres of ranch land, it makes the scale literal. A single AI facility draws as much electricity as a mid-sized city.¹⁸ The city of Abilene has committed to supporting the project’s water needs even as the developers market a closed-loop cooling design as low-impact. The frontier here is measured in megawatts and acre-feet.

The third is political. Extraction on this scale runs on public subsidy. Texas exempts qualifying data centers from state sales tax on their equipment and electricity, a break estimated to cost roughly 3.2 billion dollars in foregone revenue over two years, layered on top of local property-tax abatements and a state with no personal income tax.¹⁹ The wildcatter is the figure who ties the three levels together. He condemns the state as an obstacle to enterprise while depending on privileged access to its grid, its land, and its treasury: government hostility funded, in practice, by government resources.

The continuity beneath the rupture

The rupture is real, and it can be oversold. Read closely; the two ideologies share a spine. Both run on the myth of an endless frontier. Both center a heroic entrepreneur whose gifts justify his freedom. Both preach hostility to a government they quietly rely on, a contradiction critics identified in the Californian case long ago, noting that Silicon Valley’s growth rested on decades of defense funding and public subsidy even as it declared its independence.¹ Turner concedes the point about his own subject: the Californian network already contained the extraction that followed, and the sweet, hip California model was, in his words, “pretty malevolent as well.”²⁰

The clearest proof that the ideology travels is that it has traveled back. In February 2025 the Stanford Review, a conservative student paper cofounded by Peter Thiel, published an essay titled “Manifest Destiny is the Enduring Antidote to Bureaucracy,” arguing that Texas oil wildcatters and SpaceX alike thrived because the frontier stayed unregulated and calling for the conquest of Greenland and Mars.²¹ Turner quotes it as the Texan Ideology completing a circuit back to the campus that helped launch the original.

The geography itself refuses to stay tidy, which is the point. Oracle, a headline Texas arrival, announced in 2024 that it would move its world headquarters onward to Nashville.¹⁰ Tesla’s Austin workforce fell by roughly a quarter from its 2023 peak.¹¹ And San Francisco re-centered the industry it was supposed to have lost: Bay Area startups captured 57 percent of all US venture funding in 2024, and xAI, Musk’s own AI company, moved into OpenAI’s former San Francisco headquarters even as he moved his legacy firms out.²² The lesson is that the Texan Ideology was never really about the state of Texas. The industry scattered across coasts and states; the mythology is what settled.

The looted imaginary

There is a mechanism beneath the myth, and a July 2026 essay by Ali Rıza Taşkale in Aeon names it. Tech leaders raid science fiction for its aesthetic and discard its politics. Taşkale calls this “reactionary futurism,” the deployment of science-fiction imagery to make a return to nineteenth-century frontier capitalism feel like bold progress.²³ The same inversion recurs case after case, each time borrowing a story’s surface while dropping the politics that gave it meaning:

• Star Trek. At Starbase in January 2026, Musk pitched the assembled Pentagon leadership on making “Star Trek real,” invoking a franchise whose Federation is a post-scarcity, post-capitalist civilization to sell a militarized commercial space program.²⁴
• Snow Crash. Meta took its name and mission from the “metaverse” of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, a novel Stephenson wrote as dystopian satire and who has stated he had zero contact with the company appropriating it.²⁵
• The Lord of the Rings. Palantir borrowed the seeing stones of Tolkien’s Middle-earth, objects that in the source text corrupt and manipulate everyone who looks into them, as the brand name for a surveillance firm that markets itself as wise foresight.²⁶
• Foundation. Musk casts himself as Foundation‘s Hari Seldon while skipping the collective institutions that, in Asimov’s anti-authoritarian design, are the whole point of the story.²⁷
• Blade Runner. Musk described the Cybertruck as a “cyberpunk, Blade Runner” machine and unveiled it in Los Angeles in the same month and year as the film’s dystopian 2019 setting, wearing the surface of a warning as a badge of the future.²⁸

Timnit Gebru’s critique of AI-risk discourse names the underlying move: it “ascribes agency to a tool rather than the humans building the tool,” and it lets the people responsible hide behind the machine.²⁹

Palantir’s chief executive Alex Karp supplies the register. In his 2025 book The Technological Republic, co-written with Nicholas Zamiska, he calls for the will to “build coalitions and bands of warriors,” a line one critical reviewer reads as a literal call to arms.³⁰ The vocabulary of the frontier reaches for the vocabulary of the warband.

The parallel to this garden’s reading of robotics is exact. As with the inherited robot images that shape what we expect of physical AI, these looted science-fiction stories are images of the future doing present-day political work. The aesthetic promises tomorrow, while the politics it smuggles in belong to the nineteenth century.

Where the concept overreaches

What follows is my own assessment. As of this writing, there is no published scholarly critique of Turner’s thesis, and reception has been amplificatory, so the counterweight has to come from the reading itself.

The Texan Ideology is a polemical ideal type, and it should be read as one. Its periodization runs too clean, a strain the earlier section on continuity already traced: the connection era and the extraction era overlap more than a neat handoff admits. Three further limits deserve their own treatment.

The first is that Texas does more work as a symbol than as a place. The essay uses one state as a container for forces that are national and global, which risks treating a synecdoche as an explanation. The second is a religious slippage. There is a real difference between the sincere Christian nationalism of a Tim Dunn and the instrumental frontier-and-destiny language a secular founder reaches for because it flatters ambition, and the ideal type can collapse belief into rhetoric too quickly. The third is labor. The framework is strongest on capital and mythology and thinnest on the people who pour the concrete, string the fiber, and cool the servers; they appear mostly as figures in someone else’s story, and a fuller account would put the supply chain and the workforce nearer the center.

A practitioner’s view

I work as a critical futures researcher, and what draws me to this pair of terms is the working instrument it hands me. My take combines three moves.

The first is a rule about mythologies. A legitimating mythology imports the interests of whoever made it. When an actor adopts the vocabulary of the frontier and the wildcatter, they adopt the extraction narrative that vocabulary was built to justify. Run the rule backward and it becomes a diagnostic. The mythology an organization reaches for reveals what it is preparing to do. Frontier talk is an early indicator of an extraction plan.

The second move connects this to how I read technology generally. The looted science-fiction aesthetic is the same operation as the inherited robot imagery I track elsewhere in this garden: present futures, images of a tomorrow that circulate today to shape what feels possible and desirable right now. Star Trek at the Pentagon and the white android in the stock photo do identical work. They borrow the authority of the future to license a decision in the present. This is the reversal I examine through cultural lead in the physical AI primer: culture sometimes arrives first. The image supplies a script, investment follows, and engineers build toward the inherited form. Looted science fiction makes that sequence politically useful, because the moral architecture can be stripped away while the desired hardware survives.

The third move is the translation into foresight practice, and it changes what I watch. The Californian frame trained analysts to observe the user, the platform, and the network effect. The Texan frame moves the unit of observation to the territory and the megaproject, and the indicators move with it: electricity procurement and grid policy, water and land access, tax and zoning arrangements, private towns and gated compounds, and the builder-frontier-destiny narratives that announce them. Where those signals cluster alongside alliances between tech capital, resource industries, and religious-nationalist politics, the Texan pattern is forming. I hold all of this as a present future: a story told now, which is exactly why it can be observed today as a live signal. On that reading, “Texan” names a portable prototype. It describes a configuration that travels wherever compute demands territory, energy, subsidies, and exemptions, whatever the state on the map. The useful question stays concrete: when an actor tells a frontier story about the future, what claims on land, energy, and authority are they making easier to accept today?

Related concepts and further reading

For the futures-studies frame beneath this primer, start with Foresight vs. Forecasting and the distinction between present futures and future presents. On why images of the future are never neutral, see No future is neutral, Images of the Future, and Sociotechnical Imaginaries. The companion reading on inherited imagery is Physical AI vs. Embodied AI, and on the reversal in which culture leads technology, Cultural Lag and Cultural Lead. On the exit-and-rule turn, see The Network State and Exit strategies as collective surrender.

For the primary sources, read Barbrook and Cameron’s original essay and Turner’s answer to it directly.¹² Turner has developed the argument across several public talks and interviews worth following: his Stanford lecture of October 2025, a Sciences Po seminar in Paris in November 2025, and a conversation in which he defends the label technofascism as the best term currently available for the shift.¹⁴³¹

Three neighboring terms map the same territory from other angles. TESCREAL, coined by Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres in 2023, bundles the transhumanist and longtermist belief systems common among the same elite.³² Dark Enlightenment, associated with Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land, supplies the neo-reactionary political theory that treats democracy as an obstacle to be engineered away.³² And “broligarchy,” popularized by the journalist Carole Cadwalladr in 2024, names the class of tech-billionaire power the Texan Ideology dresses in frontier costume.³²